Down Sand Mountain Read Free Page B

anything, when the fact was that I was worried about everything: the Ban-Lon, the shoe polish, remembering my locker combination, the red bellies the seniors gave the new seventh-graders. When I got to the corner, Wayne and David Tremblay were already walking up Second Street. David Tremblay turned around with his Elvis hair and his eyes got big when he saw me and he laughed like a girl until Wayne punched him on the arm and he punched Wayne on
his
arm, and they ran on up Second toward the high school.
    I decided I was mad at everybody, especially Wayne, who’d called me a freaktoid and wouldn’t wait for me even though he knew, because I had told him in secret, how scared I was about high school and the red bellies and remembering my locker combination and all. I wished I could be a Lone Wolf the way he was last year, only he had
wanted
to do that — chew on toothpicks and stand on one leg against the wall with his arms crossed and his other leg pulled up so his foot was braced against the wall behind him, which left a dirty shoe print, which was part of being a Lone Wolf. For me, though, I’d have been a Lone Wolf if it meant kids wouldn’t make fun of me anymore, but I’d rather everybody just liked me instead.
    I slowed down walking and finally just stopped there in the middle of the street.
    The Ban-Lon must have affected my brain, or maybe it was the chemicals from the shoe polish, but it finally got through my thick skull that there wasn’t any way anybody who didn’t like me before was going to start liking me now, on account of how colored I looked, and as bad as it was with Wayne and Tink at home, it was going to be a million times worse at high school. The seniors would probably give me a red belly so hard it would rupture my kidney or spleen or something, which was how the Great Houdini died. A guy showed up at Houdini’s dressing room and said he’d heard Houdini could tense his stomach muscles to take any blow no matter how hard and was that true and could he try it? Houdini was lying on a couch, talking to his admirers, and maybe grunted but didn’t really pay any attention, so he wasn’t ready when the guy hauled off and socked him in the gut. I was a big fan of the Great Houdini except for the part where he died the agonizing death. It was the one thing he couldn’t ever escape.
    So I didn’t go to school. Where I went instead was the doghouse in W.J. Weller’s backyard so I could hide with W.J.’s old bassett hound, Lightning, until everybody was gone to school, then sneak down to Bowlegs Creek until I wasn’t colored anymore, or at least until three o’clock, when the bell rang at the end of school.
    I didn’t stay in the doghouse too long, though, because Lightning wouldn’t move over and give me any room. Also, they must have been feeding him on a lot of beans.
    It took me about an hour to get to Bowlegs because every time I heard a car I had to jump in the bushes, plus it was three miles south of the Sand Mountain city limits. Bowlegs Creek was where the Indian outlaw Billy Bowlegs hid in the old days, I think when they chased him out of the Everglades. My mom said the army caught all the Miccosukee Indians and put them on a train to somewhere, and Billy Bowlegs was the only one they couldn’t find.
    Bowlegs Creek twists around the woods under cypress trees so thick you can’t see the sky, so it’s cool and dark all the time, and they say Billy Bowlegs’s ghost might be living under one of those cypresses, hidden behind the cypress knees or in a hollow place carved up under the bank like the alligator nests that aren’t supposed to be there, either.
    One day back in July, we found five colored boys there. I don’t think anybody said anything for a couple of minutes, because we had never seen colored boys anywhere we played and couldn’t believe they would come to Bowlegs Creek, which everybody knew was ours, not the colored people’s.
    We stared at them on the one bank; they